According to a former Albany bishop, he returned priests accused of sexual misconduct to ministry without contacting law enforcement.
In a deposition unsealed March 25, the former Bishop of Albany stated that he failed to report multiple cases of alleged sexual abuse of minors by priests, preferring to keep the charges secret and refer the priests for therapy.
Bishop Emeritus Howard Hubbard, who led the diocese from 1977 to 2014, is facing claims of sexual abuse, which he denies, as well as a slew of lawsuits brought under New York’s Child Victims Act of 2019. In cases where the statute of limitations had already expired, that legislation established a one-year window for clergy sex abuse lawsuits, which has since been extended until August 2021.
Hubbard returned to active ministry after treating many priests accused of sexual assault.
Hubbard took the deposition in 2021 as part of his defense to the Child Victims Act cases. According to the Associated Press, Hubbard said that he didn’t report the charges to law authorities because he didn’t believe he was compelled to do so by law, and instead kept them hidden out of fear for “scandal and the priesthood’s respect.”
Hubbard has defended his handling of abuse allegations, claiming that it was “standard procedure” in the 1970s and 1980s, while he has admitted that failing to tell the parish and the public whether a priest was removed or restored from ministry was a mistake.
In an August 2021 article, he claimed that in the 1970s and 1980s, sending priests to “nationally accredited treatment facilities rather than reporting the allegations to local law enforcement authorities” was “common practice,” and that “the victims themselves did not want to make the matter public and many times sought confidentiality through their attorneys.”
“While we never condoned, ignored, or treated sexual abuse of minors lightly,” Hubbard wrote in 2021, “we did not respond as fast, as knowledgeably, or as compassionately as we should have,” he said.
Every day, my most sincere hope is that the victims and survivors, as well as their families, will find healing, reconciliation, and peace in God’s love, and that we, as a church and society, will learn from this tragedy.”
Hubbard is presently the subject of a Vos estis inquiry, a Vatican-ordered probe into allegations of sexual abuse. Pope Francis’ standards for investigating complaints of bishop misconduct were published in the 2019 document Vos estis lux mundi.
In March, an unnamed plaintiff filed a complaint against Hubbard, saying that he was abused by Hubbard shortly after his installation as bishop in 1977. The diocese, as well as St. Edward the Confessor Catholic Church in Clifton Park, New York, were mentioned in the complaint.
Hubbard said he had never abused a kid, according to the diocese communications director at the time of the complaint.
Bishops suspected of sexual abuse are probed by their metropolitan, in this case Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, under the Vos estis statute.
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